Socialism - Research Article from Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

Five Types of Socialism

The myriad forms of socialism that were actually put into practice might be grouped into five broad categories: communism, social democracy, Third World socialism, fascism, and communal socialism. (There were others, such as anarcho-syndicalism, that remained forever in the realm of speculative thought.) Each of these five requires a note of explication.

In the early decades of socialist thought the terms socialism and communism were often used interchangeably, and while some writers attempted to define the distinction between the two, no such distinction ever achieved widespread acceptance. When Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870–1924) led his group of Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917, he announced that they would henceforth call themselves communists. Until then, they had been merely the bolshevik (meaning majority) segment of Russia's Social-Democratic movement. (This had been a single party, at least formally, until 1912, when Lenin's faction announced it was a party in...